Magazines are not only the best way to keep yourself informed in these postmodern times - actually, the Internet is probably better - but they're also both a physical and a cultural fetish, providing a sensual experience along with a brain tickle. The feel of the leafing paper - or plastic, or tissue, or whatever material you can reach with your hand - is something mag-aficionados can hardly do without. Back in May we spoke with the zine-obsessed author of We Love Magazines, Andrew Losowsky, when he came to our very home for another round of Metaflow's Signjam. We've already shown you some here, but we've got more in store for you magazine-lovers out there. This two-part videoblog features Losowsky as he goes on and on about his mag collection, talking about every piece as a newborn child softly rocked in his arms. How moving, huh?
We (really) love magazines
Groping Nature
We've already explored a less-known side of Ibiza in this mission here, but some of the guys appearing in that video deserved some more of our video-blessing. Talk about loving nature: this two absolute chiefs here represent the two sides of the alternative Ibiza. One is an old time hippie living life as it comes, happy to be given each day and to live it in harmony with the universe, the other is a tourist's best friend, providing the eccentric and informal kind of human material people expect to find on the island and the loving material women long for when leaving the city for vacation. You girls can't but quiver in excitement, you guys can't but learn how to live.
Fuorisalone's baraonda - Interview with Gilda Bojardi
We've been covering the Fuorisalone in Milan a lot when it was time back in April, but we still have something more to show you guys, even in the sweaty hot days of late-July. Our own Fabio Falzone interviewed the Interni magazine director Gilda Bojardi, one of the key figures who made Zona Tortona what it is today, putting it on the Design Week map. She visited our headquarters in Via Oslavia and, after we showed her how CIA works, she told us some of her precious share of Salone history. Enjoy.
Pearls Before Swine - CIA goes jury
Perle ai Porci - italian for Pearls to Swine - is a music festival where you pay no entrance fee and, apart from the bands playing anything from ska to rock, you can enjoy a 4-day pork meat fair. Groupies should know it's no place for rockstars, but a few days of fun and a music contest make up for it.
CIA has been there, documenting some of the guys playing and the atmosphere at the sport center in Casale Corte Cerro, where the festival was. And, more importantly, we were also proudly represented by our very own Andrea Lissoni, Luca Martinazzoli and Luca Legnani Jr., all in the contest jury.
Check out this video for a taste of what they've seen.
The Transmitting Architecture Report
We're through with editing, delaying and working on the video material we collected back in Turin last week, and we're finally releasing a considerable amount of brand new stuff for you guys to enjoy.
This video blog load features:
- Aaron Betsky having a talk with us about language in architecture;
- Cino Zucchi and Mirko Zardini discussing about communication practices (they laugh when we ask them about communication in the congress);
- P.K. Das speaking out about social changes, equality and architecture;
- François Roche heavily critiquing the congress and preferring Guattari-style ecosophy to eco-sustainability;
- Mario Cucinella sharing some of his thoughts on human-scale architecture and the architecture star system.
- Adam Greenfield telling us about buildings with moving walls, open source and the internet;
It's a lot of stuff, so take your time to check it all out and come back here often for more CIA videos.
Architecture is not building
Aaron Betsky makes it pretty clear: it's not the buildings that make architecture, it's the architects, and they don't even really need to build. In fact, architecture is more about unbuilding than building, or so says Betsky.
Betsky talks about architecture like someone who is not only passionate about the building-lingo, but about life in general. It's no surprise he wrote a lot about architecture and sex, also becoming one of the main contributors to a spatial interpretation of queer theory.
During his conference at Transmitting Architecture in Turin, he explained how architecture is the whole process around building, not necessary including it. Thinking, talking, experimenting with an environment's geography, landscape, history, people, relationships, culture, beauty.
The exhibition he's curating, taking place at the Venice Biennale and titled Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, deals with interventions in space and landscapes aiming to make our world feel like home, without covering it with the "architecture graves." That is, the buildings. Betsky's vision is rather minimal: he looks for beauty in simple and subtle things rather than in grand celebrations of wealthy clients that only house bureaucrats.
Making the people feel at home in their world is the mission of the architect, but by people Betsky means the widest range possible. When we interviewed him and asked him about low-cost traveling, he believes that what we call "low-cost" is not properly "low" for the environment, and it's available only to high-end customers and not to the much bigger crowds of the poor of the world, who can't afford to satisfy their most basic needs. We're not so sure.
But enough with the babble, the video interview we made speaks for itself. Check it out.
Genre, art and architecture
In order to accomplish this mission we went to Venice for Multiversity and had the chance to interview a bunch of interesting people. Here's some of the talk we had with curator Giovanna Zapperi about the relationship between gender and its representation in art.
"I Don't Believe in Art": Loris Gréaud Talks with CIA
Giulio Frigo, a CIA research affiliate, went on a mission for Check-in Architecture, and had a very interesting talk with Loris Gréaud where the young French artist makes the declaration amongst other things, "I don't believe in art." Check out the mission we wrote about his last exhibition here. This video unlike many other interviews captures the heart of Gréaud's philosophy, and will likely be a resource for artists, students, and scholars trying to wrap their heads around Gréaud's distinctive imaginary.
Typed out - Olivetti and Ivrea in Turin
Our Check-in Point was just a few steps away, so we couldn't miss the exhibition celebrating a hundred years from the founding of the Olivetti company, and its relationship with the city of Ivrea. In case you don't know, we also wrote a mission about it. Check out the video we made, there are a couple interviews that might inspire you to apply for it. In the end, there's something strange and moving about the rise and fall of the Olivetti dream, maybe it was always doomed to failure, but one couldn't help but wish it might have worked.
John Bock's Language Cream
The Messy Adventures of the Check-In Architecture Gang:
This Week's Exciting Episode!
Artist John Bock's performance-lectures are the things of legend. Weird, funny, and seriously nonsensical to anyone but perhaps Bock, they fall somewhere in-between the Mad Hatter, a physics professor, Joseph Beuys, and Paul McCarthy. He hasn't "lectured" publicly in two years, but one is planned during the opening of his newest exhibition in Milan. Our editor Nicola Bozzi heads to Galleria Gio Marconi in Milan to see if Bock lives up to the hype or if his madness is a put on. Given his playful obsession with Hannibal Lecter, white curly wigs, and language cream, we're pretty sure that whatever you can say about John Bock, he's very, very serious.
McGOURMET
To our American editor, Andrew Berardini, McDonald's is a heart attack dipped in lard and fried. But McDonald's is trying to renew their reputation by going designer, and what better place to launch it than Milan during the Salone del Mobile (lest we forget this translates to "Furniture Showroom"). A designer hamburger sounds to Check-In Architecture like a pig in a bikini, but we'll let Mickey D's, in the form of Paolo Mereghetti and the designer of the new food, Italian chef Claudio Sadler speak for themselves.
